Our keynote speaker will be Shaun Gallagher who joined the University of Memphis as the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in 2011. His areas of research include phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, especially topics related to embodiment, self, agency and intersubjectivity, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of time. Dr. Gallagher is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen where he has also been Visiting Professor. He has a secondary research appointment at the University of Hertfordshire. He has held visiting positions at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, the Centre de Recherche en Epistémelogie Appliquée (CREA), Paris, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon. During the summer term 2012 he was Visiting Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Professor Gallagher is currently Principal Investigator on a European Commission Marie Curie Actions Grant: TESIS: Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity (2011-15) and a Templeton Foundation grant: Space, Science and Spirituality (2011-13); he is co-PI on an NSF grant: Metaphor-Based Learning of Physics Concepts Through Whole-Body Interaction in a Mixed Reality (2011-14), an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant: Embodied Virtues and Expertise (2010-13); and a British Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC] grant The Nature of Phenomenal Qualities (2010-12). Professor Gallagher is also the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

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The limits of affordances are directly related to the limits of direct perception. Developing claims made against direct perception by Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn (1981), I will argue that only some elements of the world can be directly perceived. Those in favor of affordances have been right to reject Fodor and Pylyshyn's blanket denial that direct perception is possible (Turvey et al. 1981), however, this does not mean that all of the arguments the pair introduced are incorrect.

Through careful attention to what we can conclude about direct perception, it will emerge that affordances are in fact possible, but only when tied to the physical mechanisms that an organism possesses. This explicitly rules out the direct perception of learned behaviors, for these must be built upon some cognitive mechanism and thereby rely on some form of cognitive mediation. For example, while a fork could be directly perceived by anyone as pick-up-able, or move-able, being aware that a fork is a tool for eating is not an immediate response. Without some exposure to the practices of using a fork as cutlery, there is no spontaneous desire to use a fork to transport food to one's mouth; in other words, the meaning of a fork as a tool for eating cannot be derived purely by looking at one.
 

I will defend this conclusion against two counter claims, the first being that cultural practices are directly perceivable due to their physical presence in the environment (Heft 2003), and secondly, that affordances can be nested, and through nested affordances, we can account for learned behavior. Through dismissing these claims it will be concluded that only a limited notion of affordances is possible. This will undermine externalist theories that use the idea outside of this limited scope and show how such theories either need to be abandoned or are required to posit some other cognitive mechanism in order to account for learned behaviors.
 

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Extending the Mind and the Descent of the Self

by John Baldari
johnbaldari@gmail.com

Clark and Chalmers (C&C for short) consider the act of cognition to include driving processes, which can extend to the environment. They provide three cases early in the essay that involve the rotation of computer-generated shapes to fit into a socket. The first example involves mentally manipulating the shape without the aid of the computer at all. This is argued to take the longest of the three examples. The second is to use a rotate function within the program to run through various rotations until a fit is found. This process takes less time, approximately one-fifth that required. The third example allows for some future capability where the mind can directly interface with the computer, rotating the shape with a thought. This is assumed to take the least amount of time, and that view seems compatible with intuition.
 

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Naturalism and Naturalized Phenomenology

by Matthew Raymond Childers
matthew.r.childers@wmich.edu

Although the philosophical traditions of naturalism and phenomenology are often seen as methodological opposites, proponents of naturalized phenomenology contend that the two traditions can be reconciled to their mutual benefit. In this paper, I survey the fundamental methodological assumptions both traditions as they are characterized in the traditional Quinean and Husserelian fashion and argue that, in light of these fundamental differences, projects which aim to naturalize phenomenology are fundamentally flawed due to basic, irreconcilable differences between them.
 

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Following the publication of Galen Strawson’s “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism”, panpsychism has enjoyed increasing attention as a viable contender in the search for a theory of consciousness. In his paper, Strawson presses physicalism at one of its perennial sore spots: the explanatory gap. Panpsychism, he claims, is the only coherent way of explaining how the rich phenomenology of human consciousness can arise from simple interactions at the microphysical level. However, it is unclear that his solution is tenable. Several philosophers have argued that Strawson’spanpsychism fails even to solve the problem it was developed in response to. Far from providing an intelligible account of the emergence of consciousness from microprocesses, Strawson has endorsed a mystery equally as great as the mystery surrounding the emergence of the phenomenal from the merely physical: namely, the emergence of rich macroexperience from presumably simple, but in principle unknowable, microexperience. This is the so-called problem of combination: it is mysterious how the experiences of physical ultimates “sum” to produce the experience of the being they compose.
 

I take it that the pressing task for panpsychists is first to establish their theory as a viable alternative to physicalism and dualism. With this in mind, it is crucial that the theory be shown to actually solve combination problems. Additionally, it is my suspicion that many philosophers refuse even to countenance the theory on the grounds that it is unintuitive. It is therefore paramount that panpsychists address the relevant pre-theoretic intuitions regarding phenomenal states. My project is therefore twofold. First, I examine the intuitions which may lead philosophers to reject panpsychism out of hand. Citing work in psychology and experimental philosophy, I argue that folk phenomenological attribution of conscious states is guided by superficial mechanisms, and that we should therefore be dubious of their import to debates in the metaphysics of consciousness. I then explore the criticisms summarized above, as well as a recent panpsychist response by Sam Coleman, who claims that combination problems can be solved by denying that physical ultimates are subjects simply because they have experiences. I argue that Coleman’s solution is inadequate on the grounds that it both fails to provide an intelligible account of the emergence of subjective experience, and requires problematic views of the nature of experience and experiential subjects. Finally, I tentatively propose two panpsychist solutions to the problem ofcombination. The first I call conciliatory panpsychism (CP). CP is a species of neutral property monism. It proposes that the fundamental properties studied by physicists really are, as the physicalists say, the only fundamental properties, but that these properties are in some sense phenomenal. According to CP, for every fundamental property there is some way that it is like to bear that property. A parasitic explanation of the emergence of macroexperience from microexperience is therefore readily available in the complicated, but intelligible, explanation of the physical composition of the experiencing organism. My second proposal, ultimates panpsychism (UP), follows William James in denying the compositionality of experience. Under UP, all and only physical ultimates are conscious. While it is prima facie implausible, I argue that it does, at least, solve the problem of combination. I then briefly address Philip Goff’s criticisms of this version of panpsychism, arguing that they are unfounded. I conclude the paper with general comments on the state of panpsychism, and possibilities for its future.
 

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In the sixth or fifth century B.C.E. at Deer Park in Sarnath, India, ?akhyamuni Buddha introduced a profound teaching about our suffering, its cause, its cessation and the path to its cessation. In India a number of Buddhist philosophical schools emerged in which it was assumed that his teaching was based on a theory of persons they developed into a theory that includes an explanation of the ontological status of persons, a presentation of arguments for the theory and against rival theories, replies to objections to the theory, and an account of the relevance of the theory to the problem of suffering. Since the Buddha did not fully explain the theory of persons that underlies his teaching, in later centuries three importantly different interpretations were developed in the schools. Here I briefly explain the different interpretations.
 

One of these interpretations is presented by the celebrated Indian Buddhist philosopher, Vasubandhu, who composed the "Refutation of the Theory of a Self," a Buddhist treatise on "the selflessness of persons". In the "Refutation" Vasubandhu presents and defends the interpretation of the Buddha's theory of persons accepted within both the Kaśmīrī Vaibhāsika School and the original Sautrāntika School. Their interpretation is accepted with variations in most Indian Buddhist philosophical schools. His treatise is mainly concerned with (i) a presentation and critique of the very different interpretation of the Buddha's theory that is accepted within the Indian Buddhist philosophical schools called the Pudgalavāda Schools because of the unorthodox account of the "person" (pudgala) presented in them, and (ii) detailed replies to objections to his theory presented by the Pudgalavādins and a non-Buddhist school of philosophers in India called the Vaiśesikas. The Pudgalavādins' theory of persons is the second interpretation of the Buddha's theory of persons in Indian Buddhist philosophical schools.
 

The most complete statement of the third interpretation is that presented by the Mādhyamika philosopher, Candrakīrti, in verses 120-65 of the sixth chapter of the Introduction to the Middle Way and in his commentary on these verses, which is included in his Autocommentary on the Introduction to the Middle Way. Candrakīrti presents his interpretation of the Buddha's theory of persons as the theory sketched by Nāgārjuna in the Treatise on the Middle Way, which is the central treatise upon which the Madhyamaka School of Indian Buddhist philosophy was developed. Some years after he had completed the Introduction and Commentary Candrakīrti wrote Clear Words, his commentary on Nāgārjuna's Treatise. In this commentary he sometimes refers his readers to the Introduction. In his Clear Words commentary on the first half of Chapter 18 of the Treatise 18, for instance, he quotes four verses of the Commentary. I draw upon these texts to explain Indian Buddhist theories of persons.
 

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I will proceed, then, by first making explicit — i.e. reconstructing from the fragmentary explanations provided by Descartes – the full corporeo-mental causal account of the arousal of passions that fits Descartes’ theory. This will provide the context within which I will address the issues mentioned above. Five stages or aspects of that causal account are particularly significant in this sense. First, understanding passions in terms of what occurs in the mind-body union helps provide a more complete view of the Cartesian mind as well as understand the place of “passions of the soul” in it — in particular, in reference, to other passions (such as sensations or appetites). Secondly, a discussion of whether the arousal of a Cartesian passion involves a representation – whether one or several, which type of representation, and how that representation differs from the representation that supposedly occurs in the case of sensations — is of enormous importance to understand their function and the benefits of controlling them. Thirdly, an exploration of how the object-passion relation can be altered — passively (by our constitution, whether natural or shaped by experience) and, actively, by our will — will help understand the possibility and the limitations of exerting any control over them. Fourthly, an examination of the final stage of the sequence we should call a Cartesian passion — i.e. the “disposition” to want something they bring about — is crucial to comprehend the ethical aspects of Descartes’ theory. Finally, the causal account as a whole – as well as each specific stage—serves to observe the tension passions created in Descartes’ own dualism and to understand his own attempts to find a solution.
 

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As such this paper seeks to examine the extent to which neuroscience undermines, reinforces, reconfigures or outright rejects Sartre and how reliable such research is, through surveying the various neuroscientific theories of consciousness. Certainly we must not forget that neuroscience, as with all science, relies on philosophical intuitions and metaphysical principles. Thus as tempting as it may be to vindicate Sartre through coaxing his philosophy in scientific jargon, we must stay open, attentive and philosophical in our deliberations.
 

Critically through exploring the neuroscientific challenge in such a way, the paper argues three things: first that as far as the neural-correlates of consciousness (or indeed the scientific explanation of it) is concerned, the jury is still out. Thus the demand that Sartre (or Sartreans) must scientifically prove intentional consciousness is unreasonable and absurd; second, the one theory to actually and completely undermine intentional consciousness - the classical computational or functionalist approach – has become increasingly untenable. Despite encountering the hard problem of consciousness, it is generally agreed that the subjective, qualitative and intentional feel of consciousness are real properties. In this way the phenomenology underpinning Sartre’s theory of consciousness has remained relevant (at times presenting itself as neurophenomenology); third, despite not knowing the exact cause of consciousness, neuroscience and neurophenomenology certainly has found some rather interesting things regarding neural networks, memory, perception and embodiment that certainly do require consideration if the Sartrean is to remain relevant. To this extent I consider Varela’s ‘enactive’ model and Damasio’s ‘somatic markers’ hypothesis. The third point is crucial for our understanding and development of Sartre’s dialectic of the self. It is the nature of embodiment that truly presents a challenge to ‘absolute freedom’ and negation.

 

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Most important contemporary direct arguments against physicalism concern phenomenal consciousness, which is also taken to give rise to the mind-body "explanatory gap" and to "the hard problem". In contrast, intentionality is hardly taken nowadays to pose an obstacle for physicalism. An important reason for this attitude toward intentionality stems from the conviction that a naturalistic reduction of intentionality is viable. If true, the naturalistic-reductionistic approach provides an easy solution to the problem of intentionality – of how the mind hooks up to the world.

But there are exceptions to this attitude toward intentionality. First, there are a few direct anti-physicalist arguments that focus on intentionality (e.g. Plantinga's). Second, some philosophers maintain that intentionality does give rise to the hard problem and to an explanatory gap. Horgan and Tienson argue that there is a kind of intentionality – "phenomenal intentionality" – that is exhaustively determined by phenomenal character. Far from solving those problems, Horgan and Tienson take the relation that the view of phenomenal intentionality depicts between phenomenality and intentionality to double them: "[W]hy should a mental state that is grounded in this physical or physical/functional state be by its intrinsic phenomenal nature directed in this precise manner?"
 

The view of phenomenal intentionality concerns intrinsic intentionality, in the sense of intentionality that an entity has in itself – independently of its relations to other entities and of any interpretation. If this view did not concern intrinsic intentionality, it would be no more exciting than the view that linguistic entities have intentionality, and it could not base any consideration for a physical- phenomenal explanatory gap and hard problem. However, I will argue that the notion of intrinsic intentionality is untenable. The conviction that the intentionality of the phenomenal is intrinsic is rooted in a kind of perspective illusion: from the first-person perspective, it seems to be simply "there". Self (semantic) interpretation is doomed to escape our gaze because it is made from the inside, and thus no gap – to be bridged by interpretation – appears to obtain between the bearer of intentionality and intentionality. The paradigmatic case of interpretation – in which one interprets another – misleads us to overlook self-interpretation and replace it by alleged intrinsic intentionality. I will argue that intentionality, as transcendence of an entity beyond itself, must depend on interpretation. Phenomenal intentionality is similar to the intentionality of language: both depend on interpretation and are not intrinsic. Due to the un-tenability of the notion of intrinsic intentionality, there cannot be sound intentionality- based anti-physicalist arguments, and intentionality can pose no explanatory gap or hard problem.
 

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The pursuit of excellence is apportioned among myriad practices of varyingly correlated intellectual or physical, theoretical or practical, rational or emotional, and active or passive variants. Mainstream views on cognition favor the antecedents in the previous disjunctions, valuing theoretical knowledge over practical know-how. The contention here is that active pursuits, being kinesthetically grounded in movement, are an advantageous key component of our understanding of excellence and cognition, both as subjects of study and as methodological tools and modes themselves. Such activities kinetically cultivate excellence, abilities, and character. Additionally, they require a creative modus operandi and the exercise of skill to handle their inherently practical challenges. Thus theoria becomes kinetic praxis — wise intelligence grounded in movement. As Sheets-Johnstone argues in The Roots of Thinking and elsewhere, movement has intrinsic gnostic possibilities, particularly when coupled to refined methodological analysis.
 

To best understand how to excel, which entails varied cognitive modes, we need to expand the customary study from common abilities and performers to exemplar performances and masters. Recent work on skillful coping (Breivik, Moe) shows prevalent logical and phenomenological accounts as inadequate when vetted in the field of high-performance. Moreover, classical cognitivist research emphasizes vision and laboratory tests, favors quantitative analyses, and under-develops its scarce real life examples (e.g., Kentridge’s or Prinz’s work on attention). Besides studying abilities in real life situations via methodologies that include qualitative analyses derived from personal accounts and phenomenology, because vision is vitally tethered to movement, kinesthesia and tactility must complement said customary approaches.
 

Brief but suggestively sketched, three fruitful inquiry lines result from engaging the topics of other minds and the relation of mind to environment. These cognitive issues, theorized under the rubric of the normative now, connect movement and cognition to broader moral and social domains: 1) Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and MacIntyre help argue that we already form part of communities, thus sidestepping “the problem of other minds.” Excellence thrives, ceteris paribus, under a rich communitarian collaborative climate that provides standards of excellence. 2) Since movement involves a body kinetically engaging its environment, analysis of these pursuits also implies norms and ways that implicate extended models of the mind. And 3) these communities and the varied kinetic opportunities to engage the environment entail culturally comparative analysis of excellence and cognition.
 

This interdisciplinary approach to active pursuits within the framework of corporeal kinetic cognition considers persistent problems in cognition and the normative in novel ways: 1) switching habitual conceptualizations between normative and cognitive domains, and 2) shifting traditional research foci from everyday abilities and people to skilled performance and individuals, and from vision and laboratory to moving bodies in real life. In short, exploring excellence and cognition under the aegis of movement originally supplements cognitively embodied approaches.

 

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In analyzing Nietzsche’s use of the textual interpretation metaphor for human cognition, I show what, if anything, in the domain of human cognition is analogous to the basic elements in the act of interpreting a text, namely: 1. The text itself. 2. The interpretation of a text. 3. The one who interprets. 4. The “true” meaning of a text. I argue that the text itself is analogous to nature or the world. The interpretation of a text is analogous to the content of an act of cognition. The one who interprets is analogous to the cognizer. I also argue that there is no element of human cognition that is analogous to the true meaning of a text.
 

After highlighting what Nietzsche’s use of the textual interpretation metaphor tells us about human cognition, I argue that the metaphor has serious limitations and that by missing those limitations, various readers of Nietzsche have misunderstood his theory of cognition. The single most important limitation of the textual interpretation metaphor is the fact that when we are attempting to interpret a text, we have access to the text itself. So for example, the first two lines of Elliot’s “The Wasteland” are “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing.” If one reads those two lines, one has access to the text of the first two lines of the poem. This has no analogue in human cognition; one does not have access to nature or the world, the analogs to the text itself in Nietzsche’s theory of cognition. One’s cognitive relationship to the world is always in principle mediated such that even our immediate perceptual experience of the world is already an interpretation. On these grounds, I argue against those who claim that the textual interpretation metaphor precludes the possibility that Nietzsche’s theory of cognition implies a radical form of skepticism.
 

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A commonly cited shortcoming in Kant's philosophy among contemporary philosophy of mind is his seeming neglect of the body. By focusing on faculty psychology and cognitive architecture, Kant appears to overlook the connection between embodiment and consciousness. However, new research into Kant's philosophy argues for a richer account of the embodiment. In particular, Angelica Nuzzo's (2008) development of Kant's theory of the imagination as an embodied imagination argues for a richer account of the body in Kant. In this paper, I wish to extend Nuzzo's argument for embodiment in Kant's philosophy into the sphere of contemporary philosophy of mind.

Contemporary research into philosophy of mind and consciousness, notably John Searle's work (1997, 2002, 2004), argues for an elemental connection between consciousness and the body. Searle’s biological naturalism promotes a non-reductive understanding of consciousness as emerging from lower-level physical processes. Embodiment and consciousness, so the argument claims, go hand in hand. Such a material monism avoids the trenchant problems with dualism, both Cartesian and property, while rejecting the reductionist tendency to ignore first-person descriptions of the mind and its functions. Searle's biological naturalism attempts to preserve first person accounts of the "what it's like" of being conscious while explaining the physical processes occurring at the neurological level.
 

In order to bridge the gap between Kantian critical philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind, I will employ an explicit articulation of imagination in Kant and its connectivity to the body while extending it through Shaun Gallagher's (2006) distinction between body schema and body image and their development through neonate nativism into explicitly representative cognitive functions. By doing so, I plan to demonstrate how the imagination is at work in embodiment and higher level cognitive functions. This illustration will provide a preliminary explanation found missing in much of Searle's biological naturalism and may provide explanatory power in determine just how the body shapes the mind, without reducing the mind to simple mechanical causality.

 

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Formal Cognitive Architecture
by Daniel Weissglass
dweissglass@gmail.com
 

This paper addresses concerns involving the clarity and tractability – both empirical and formal – of the distinctions between the proposed kinds of cognitive-world interactions. The proposed modeling systems are formalized using tools from information, graph, and control theories so that the distinct predictions and structures of each modeling system become clear. Formalization introduces some friction with less formal accounts, but the main considerations of the literature should be accommodated by the formal accounts presented here. These formalizations will allow more rigorous discussion of what is at stake in choosing models of cognitive-world interactions, and clarify the distinctions between the modeling systems themselves.
 

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